Encounter with Tiber [v1.0]

by By Buzz Aldrin

  “Not immune when it happens, anyway. You might say I am offering us a long-term vaccination.”

  The image on the screen swam into shape. It was clearly an aircraft, long and thin, with delta wings at its rear and a canard wing just behind the pilot’s cabin.

  “You of all people have sampled the pleasures of the Earth. Imagine, then, that you could sample pleasures beyond the Earth—”

  For the next few hours he took them back and forth, from what was possible and could be done tomorrow, to a vision of life a century further on when their grandchildren would hang glide off Olympus Mons on Mars and climb mountains on the back side of the Moon. He sketched out pleasures they had never thought of—and at the same time stressed how many hard and practical reasons there were for each step on the way. He pointed out that it would cost a great deal and involve great risks, and at the same time made them feel like they were the few, special people who could afford to take those risks and might well be the ones to lead humanity into its spacefaring future.

  Then he got more concrete. Space tourism, in the kind of long run that the super-wealthy families must deal with, could lead to space industrialization, which could lead to a cleaner, richer, safer world for everyone. Once private industry was operating freely in space on a big scale, the rest could follow quickly, because there were abundant resources of many kinds on the Moon and in the asteroids. But no one would go after those resources directly. Earth-based sources were invariably cheaper—”unless,” Sig said, “thousands of people are already going there anyway and there’s a known, cheap, easy-to-use technology for doing it. And that’s the point. If you want that better world, we need to see space tourism take off right away, and it can’t be as a plaything of a tiny group of super-rich people. It’s got to have broad-based public support and enthusiasm right from the start. And for that, ladies and gentlemen, I propose—ShareSpace Global.”

  Sig had spent a decade learning to be a superb salesman, and he had spent almost as long learning how money worked. He knew what would titillate his audience and what would flatter them. And with careful timing, he had just announced the name of his company to be as the clock chimed midnight, making it the official thirtieth anniversary of the first landing on the Moon.

  The plan was breathtakingly simple: build up space-based tourism by beginning with simple earthly activities (trips to see space launches, tours of scientific facilities, high-altitude flights with zero-gravity experience guided by ex-astronauts); move rapidly into suborbital ballistic flights above the atmosphere; from there to orbital adventure trips and to luxury Hilton hotels in orbit; then low-altitude circumnavigations of the Moon— “and as far after that as anyone cares to go!”

  “So who’s going to go on these and how much are you charging for tickets?” a voice asked in a Southern drawl, out of the darkness.

  Sig knew the voice, pointed himself toward the speaker, and said, “Two classes of people. One, we have tickets available that you just buy, at a healthy markup. So you and your kids might just do it for a special occasion. Two—and here’s what’s important—we sell shares.”

  “Not like timeshare condos?” a voice asked from another corner.

  “Not much. Figure it’s a little like a church raffle, where the top prize is really great, the other prizes make you feel like the ticket was worthwhile, and the many people who don’t get anything are encouraged to think that they’re doing something good for the world as a whole. Now obviously only some of the people who buy shares get the big prizes, whatever those are as we develop—eventually, of course, the big prizes are the rides to space. Thousands more get consolation prizes of one kind or another intended to get them more interested and make them more space-crazy. And for those who don’t win anything, we discount your number of chances some percentage, and then put you back into the pool next time with that reduced number of chances. So nobody ever loses all at once, but there’s always a strong incentive to buy more.”

  “You didn’t say how much you’ll charge either for a flat-rate ticket or for a share.”

  “There’ll be a board of adjusters that changes that constantly; it’ll need adjustment all the time. But figure the first flat-rate tickets in each new class of service will be in the tens of thousands of dollars—which means, by the way, we don’t do it till our lift cost per pound is less than five percent of what the shuttle is currently running—and shares might be around ten dollars.”

  An older, white-haired man—whose face had been well known on television before he had gained and kept sixty pounds—put up his hand and asked, “Uh, I hate to mention this, but I do believe people like me could die from high acceleration, and that is just what I would encounter if I did this.”

  Sig grinned. “Well, we’d need to put you in front of a doctor and have him check you out. Some people can’t even handle excitement. And there are people with bad backs and brittle bones. But the numbers are like this: for a suborbital flight, the most you’d have to handle is 1.6 gees—and 1.4 is more typical. So if you weigh 230, you’d have maybe five minutes of weighing ninety-two more pounds, which isn’t so bad if you’re lying flat on a couch. Even many people with heart disease can handle that, especially if we give them pure oxygen through a breathing tube.

  “For orbital flights we’d have to go up to about three gees, and that is a lot compared to normal gravity at Earth surface—that 230-pound person would weigh in at almost 700—but what it really excludes is only people with severe osteoporosis, arterial plaques, or emphysema.

  “None of which are at all common in people with a passion for thrill sports. It’s true we’d be shutting out the lifelong overeating, heavy-smoking couch potato, but most of them aren’t out for a thrill ride anyway—if they were, they’d have been skiing or mountain biking or hang gliding on Earth, and they wouldn’t be in that shape.”

  The older man chuckled. “Well, it sounds like I’d be marginal. And at least I’d have ten years to lose some weight. I don’t suppose you know offhand what the acceleration for a Moon trip would be like? One thing you’re forgetting is that some of your passengers won’t be there for the ride, but for the view.”

  Sig nodded. “Of course. As long as you don’t go all the way out to the Moon—as long as you just go up, and make a few elliptical orbits, out to a thousand kilometers—then the acceleration at peak is about the same as it is for a simple low Earth orbit trip. Peak acceleration comes from re-entry, you see, not from launch. If you were to go to a lunar distance, then you’d be up at six g’s or so, which is rough—because you just can’t take enough fuel along to allow you to come back, decelerate into low Earth orbit, and then descend. From a lunar return you’d have to plunge right into the atmosphere and use the air to slow you down, same as the old Apollo capsules did. That’s why we’re not planning to offer flights to the Moon for a long, long time—not until we can think about decelerating people in stages to hold down peak acceleration.”

  The heavy man nodded. The woman beside him tentatively put up her hand and said, “Didn’t you mean hold down deceleration? You’re slowing down—”

  Sig smiled. “Deceleration is an English teacher word.”

  “I was an English teacher. At least until this actor led me astray.”

  “Well, if you’d taken a walk down the hall to science class, you’d have found out that physicists define acceleration as change in speed or direction of motion, because it all has the same effect. Your body doesn’t care whether you’re experiencing one g because you’re in a centrifuge that’s constantly changing your direction of motion, or because you’re speeding up or slowing down, or because you’re in a one-g gravitational field. It’s all the same thing and it’s all called acceleration.” He stretched and smiled at them all. “And, of course, recreationists have known for many years that acceleration, at least in reasonable doses, is what’s known as fun—or how do you explain skyboarding, extreme skiing, roller coasters, and aerobatics?”

  Salesman that
he was, he knew it was time to set the hook, so he put the questions to them then—would they want to take this step? Was this the time?

  Some, of course, resisted it; no salesman is perfect. But enough had stepped forward to shake Sig’s hand and make arrangements for further discussions. Within weeks papers were drawn up, large loans at long terms were extended, and a board of directors for the new company was in place (though in reality Sig had control of everything). As of August 4, 1999, ShareSpace Global was underway.

  From the beginning it was attacked by government and media. After two years of running tours to Canaveral, Baikonur, Hainan, and JPL, plus “Meet the Astronauts” luncheons and expanded Space Camps, Share-Space Global had begun to sell shares and tickets for suborbital flights, though they did not yet have a vehicle.

  Just as the beginnings of investigations were underway, ShareSpace Global rolled out plans for their first project: Skygrazer, a modified version of a Starbooster shell. The forward engine was there, but where the Zenit rocket itself had been, there was a comfortable space for a dozen passengers, pilot, copilot, and attendant. The Skygrazer could then be attached, belly-to-belly, with a Starbooster, and launched vertically.

  It didn’t have nearly enough thrust to get to orbit, but it didn’t need it to provide people with the ride of their lives. When the Zenit burned the last of its fuel and the stages separated, the Skygrazer would continue on upward until it reached an altitude of just over 50,000 meters. At this point it would be moving at nearly Mach 4 (four times the speed of sound—orbit is about Mach 25) as it plunged over and dove back into the lower atmosphere. At its tremendous speed, the pilot could then bring it to almost level flight, and it would glide for many hundreds of miles, far higher and faster than any airliner ever conceived. This suborbital ride would include almost ten minutes of weightlessness, a view of the Earth from well above the atmosphere, and of course the amazingly fast and silent glide across the better part of a continent. Rights were arranged to various resorts that Sig owned, where runways were to be specially lengthened for Skygrazer landings; passengers would be whisked from the Skygrazer to a large, comfortable cruise ship, taken on a tour of some of the more interesting areas they had overflown, and finally flown home first-class from wherever the cruise ship took them. Or, if they wished, they could spend a long, leisurely shipboard vacation, eventually reaching one of Sig’s remote sites, and then return in less than an hour on a Skygrazer. Sig could sell both the adventure of a space ride and the ability to enjoy your vacation until almost the very last minute before being whisked home in comfortable luxury.

  As for when Skygrazer would actually be built, Sig had another simple answer: it would take about forty flights to pay off the cost of one Skygrazer plus the Zenit boosters for it; as soon as enough people had paid in, either with full-price tickets or with shares, ShareSpace Global would contract with Boeing (which was ready to go whenever given the go-ahead), build and test Skygrazer, and have it flying its first passengers within six months of the magic number being reached.

  Federal safety officials were appalled at a suborbital craft carrying human cargo—much of it well-connected influential human cargo whose heirs would have access to the best lawyers on Earth—with so brief a test period. Financial officials did not like what looked either like extensive no-interest loans from customers, legalized gambling, or perhaps a Ponzi scheme; some of the tickets on the first few flights were now being scalped for more than $60,000.

  But neither could do much about it; Sig’s base of operations was in Brazil, and Brazilian authorities seemed to think nothing of the irregularities. The Brazilians had had a small-to-medium launch base for a decade, and they were happy to provide the space for long runways as well. Conveniently, too, as Sig always pointed out, they had land along the equator, where added velocity from the Earth’s rotation made getting to orbit easier. The fact that they hardly ever inspected anything or asked any questions was the unmentioned additional advantage.

  As of 2002, ShareSpace Global had filled thirty-six flights and eight of the full-price seats were now being taken up by heirs of the original purchasers. It looked very much as if by the end of the year people would finally know whether Sig was a visionary or a con man; if so, then the first flights would be in 2004, and about one out of every three seats would be assigned by the Encounter Space Raffle.

  And in the middle of all these doubts, with the world about to find out whether Sig was the “entrepreneur for the twenty-first century” (as Forbes had called him), or “a plain old-fashioned con man straight out of the nineteenth century” (as The Wall Street Journal would have it), he walked into Congress and revealed that Skygrazer was a mere first step—if you believed him—in a much bigger scheme. The next step, which physically bore a remarkable resemblance to the graceful spacecraft that had appeared on the screen at the meeting that launched ShareSpace Global, was Starbird, which, mounted on the next generation boosters, would be able to reach orbit.

  Sig’s offer was simple: the designs were essentially complete. He had bought them from a retired engineer, Hubert Davis, and provided Davis with enough qualified people and sophisticated computers to make it possible for Starbird to be flying as early as August 2005. By that time ShareSpace Global would have at least a year of experience with the Skygrazer, and furthermore would have acquired sufficient public confidence to begin expanding the Encounter Space Raffle for orbital trips.

  The Starbird had been designed to take advantage of existing technology at every turn. A simple rocket plane, its first stage would be the reliable Starbooster. On top of its sharply sloped delta wings, it would carry two DTs—drop tanks—using exactly the same disposable-tank technology that had worked so well on the shuttle. Further, Sig proposed that the drop tanks would have cutouts for easily installed hatches, which meant that every one of them could potentially be used as a habitat or for other purposes in orbit.

  Moreover, for building and operating the Starbird/Starbooster system, Sig was not asking for any direct federal money up front. Thus it wouldn’t involve spending one dime in the tight-budget year of 2003.

  All that was needed was enough of a guaranteed market so that the Starbird could be built right away, instead of having to undergo the “unfortunate delays that the necessity of proceeding cautiously had imposed” on Skygrazer. And Sig’s idea was that since Starbird would be perfectly capable of reaching the ISS, and equipped with standard docking equipment, if NASA would simply guarantee that it would buy 100 seats to either orbit or to ISS per year, at a discounted rate from ShareSpace Global, that would suffice to get him the loans he needed to put Starbird on-line much sooner. The idea was not new—it had been known as “anchor tenancy,” the idea that a guaranteed market could call a service into being, and indeed the most famous example, encouraging aviation by paying any air carrier to carry the mail, had been a great success in the 1920s and 1930s.

  Furthermore, he suggested, they could improve matters even further by not making it a special deal for ShareSpace Global, but allowing anyone, worldwide, public or private, to do the same thing: at the price set by NASA, NASA would be obligated to buy 100 seats to orbit per year from any vendor willing to offer them at that price. “In return for this,” he said in his prepared testimony, “I propose only this: that NASA be allowed only to require that its engineers evaluate the safety and reliability of the launch system. They may not in any way specify how the system achieves its goals, who builds what, where parts or fuel are acquired from, or anything else concerned with normal operations.” Here Sig paused and looked over his glasses at them. “Senators and Congressmen, let’s make sure we understand each other. The Conestoga wagons that settled this country were built with no specifications of any kind, except that they be able to go a long way without breaking down. The first airliners had fewer than ten pages of specifications each—generally only saying that they be able to carry a specified number of people a given distance, inside a fixed time, without killing the
m. If there is anything that this new frontier desperately needs, it is flexibility. If you treat this as an opportunity to parcel out goodies to Boston, South California, Texas, Seattle, and Georgia, you will quickly run the cost and the time taken through the ceiling, and you will have to pay the entire cost of the program, because no businessman in his right mind is going to touch a project in which he can neither control what he can charge nor how much it will cost him. But if you merely want to buy the results of such a project, then if it is possible to sell them at that price, someone will sell it to you. The choice is yours.”

  The controversy the commission triggered was to first bring Sig before the Congressional Joint Committee—and then to recommend that the federal government take the deal, without changes or modifications.

  There was an uproar about that which dwarfed everything else connected with the commission’s report. Congressmen from the states with large aerospace industries (except, of course, for Washington State) were appalled at the idea that the federal government might buy flights into space without spreading the expenditures around to the appropriate districts. Free-marketers declared that the millennium was at hand and soon everyone would be able to fly into space whenever they wanted. Safety officials, and the insurance companies, urged that no regulation be compromised in any way and that control of safety issues remain firmly where it belonged. Interviewed in retirement, Newt Gingrich said that this had been his idea all along and that he was sure no one in Washington now could touch it without screwing it up.